Seth Godin Does It All Wrong – Maybe You Should Too

Posted January 8th, 2010 / By Brandon Cox in Posts

Very few blogs are really good. With that established, the logical question is what makes a blog really good? Why is it that so many people read Seth Godin in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really follow most conventional wisdom about blogging and writes rather short posts? I believe it’s because he and others like him do something effectively that most blogs don’t do – they engage their readers.

You might have fallen into the trap of writing articles for the traffic, the entertainment value, or merely to fill another quota. But what if you only wrote posts that were engaging? How would it affect your readership over time?

Writing potent, powerful, engaging articles requires us to face some harsh criteria by asking three vital questions…

Am I Stimulating the Intellect? (Do I Make You Think?)

When it comes to the usability and navigation of your site, dont’ make people think. But when it comes to your content making people wrestle with concepts is the goal. Think of it this way – would your last article cause me to pause on my sprint through my feed reader? I’ll give you a hint – you can make me think starting with the title.

Am I Engaging the Emotions? (Do I Make You Feel?)

Human emotions are powerful – enough so to influence us to make destructive or life-altering choices at times. Human emotions are also like channels through which people establish a connection with us. This is why writing from the gut can be so valuable. People identify with us on the basis of an emotion.

Your article can frighten, encourage, sadden, excite, and even enrage. When it does, people will interact with it, spread it, and remember it. Further, they’ll remember that you evoked that emotion and they may just come back for more.

Am I Influencing the Will? (Do I Make You Change?)

In common marketing terminology this is the “call to action,” and this may actually need to be the starting place for our article writing. Before you get the first paragraph out, decide what you’re going to call your readers to do at the end.

Buy. Give. Comment. Share. Subscribe. Repent. Re-paint. Re-evaluate. Depending on the niche, you may want to influence your readers to do any number of things. Usually, the first two questions are pre-requisite to the third simply because people don’t normally make decisions unless they feel the need to do so based on the information they’ve received.

If we aren’t fulfilling these requirements with a large majority of our posts, we’ll never recruit a community of loyalists. This is what humanity is made of – we think, we feel, and we make decisions. Everything else is fluff. Now, go write an article that makes me think, feel, and do.

Photo Credit: marcobellucci